This poem spell bound me for the simple reason ‘aEttu surakai vazhkaiku uthavathu’ . IF you have read the poem re read the poem so many times, never once you can understand the visual imagery portrayed in this poem.

This could be another ‘first in the net’ kind of effort, I am trying to visually present the imagery described by the poet.

Visual Imagery:

Ilavam or Silk cotton trees are very fast growing trees. In India their habitat seems to be forest with very very high temperature.

The poet now describes a stage where ‘the silk cotton tress is leafless yet in flower without a bud’.

First we’ll see how Ilavam flower look,

இலவம்_ilavam

You can see it to be red flowers. If you see the green balls around they are the buds and also in deep back ground you can notice the tree has leaves.

So how does the ‘the silk cotton tress is leafless yet in flower without a bud’ look?

You will notice that the flower has dark red petals and center with bright shades of yellow and red. With slight imagination it looks like a flame in red mud container , like below

Just think of so many Ilavam flowers scattered around in one tree and think about the whole stretch of trees in the forest with so many Ilavam flowers on them. The poet builds an imagery that the Forest with the silk cotton flowers looked like

‘like a long array of red lamps in the month of karttikai lit happily by bustling women’.

And this imagery can never be realised how beautiful it is, unless and until seen by our own eyes. There is no end to the imagination of the poets of the sangam. Their intimate knowledge of nature was beautifully blended into any love poems producing some brilliant imagery. I am happy to decode one of the imagery and see it with my own eyes.

Commentry on the poem:

The Thalaivan is away in search of pride or material(on war or business) ,he has to pass through palai region which i s fruitless ,dry and arid. But if Thalaivan was with Thalaivi they could have enjoyed their time near the river bed and enjoyed the pleasures of love(and love making). If that had happened she would have stopped crying and slept for while, which she is unable to do when her lover is away.

I have noted some thing really interesting in the translation and the original poem,

observe these lines by A.K.Ramanujan,

“loving embraces,

body entering body”

body entering body is clear indication that the activity was love making. So I had a doubt, from what ever I have heard Sangam poems never exclusively contains a word which means ‘making love’. So I went through the leixcon to find the meaning of the word …

The word means embrace as well as making love. So taking the words before it

‘மெய் புகுவு அன்ன கை கவர் முயக்கம்’

மெய் – body, புகுவு- entering, அன்ன- equivalent,like

கை – hand கவர்- liking

Then if we place முயக்கம் the best meaning should be what possibly a hand can do is embrace the lover. Then take in the whole situation, they are alone and after seperation(though their uniting is imaginary..it is fueled by seperation), near the river side (think about the yarum illai thane kalvan poem…the heroine has lost her virginity near the river bed) , if we add all the situation we get an answer and likely and most possible speculation that they were going to make love. The poet himself is making us speculate that way, by choosing to employ a word which also means copulation.

The poet throws us sitatuion where we are open to imagination of what happened between them by using careful words instead of explicitly saying they made love. This is the speciality of the sangam agam poems, where they never directly refer to the act of love making or sexual union. They either use smilies,metaphors and imageries to describe it or unique case like this where the poet has used word with two meanings which also means copulation but the word embrace seems to fit perfectly to the string of words she has used.

“The kancuka are of mid-thigh length with short or long sleeves; in some the opening is on the left side, and in others it is at the front. The tunic worn by a king in hunting dress has no discernible opening at the neck, so it is probably at the back. Necklines too differed in that some were V-shaped and others were round in shape.” http://www.4to40.com/discoverindia/index.asp?article=discoverindia_satavahana

Kaccu a deravative of kancuka means a robe with stiches and opening and a neck pattern. Vambu means a kaccu specificly worn for the breast. So we can imagine it was wear which was close enough to present day pattu pavadai blouse or saree blouse. Just imagine how it would look when its spread.(Sorry for not adding any picture…when I google to find a blouse to show exaclty what poet meets, i am able to find decent enough pics, according to me to post it on the blog.. since every body has seen a blouse I hope you can imagine that easily and how it will look when it is pread out.) So lets see how the sand which has patterns like a spread out blouse would look like,

Thanks, Vairam for beautifully capturing and explaning such wonderful verses. Wish I’d paid more attention to seyyul in school days 😦
You have even surpassed A.K.Ramanujam with great cross-referencing and creative ideas.

comparing a women’s bodice to sand dunes- has also been done by
Sri Krishnadevaraya – in his composition
Amuktyamalyada in telugu. while describing the beauty of andal. the poem is the story of andal and her marriage to sri ranganathar.